In the Nazi extermination camp,
the hierarchy within each camp was strictly established.
The competence of each function clearly and exactly
defined by its very name: head of the barrack, head of
the camp, head of the Revier, head of the
Bunker, head of the gallows, head of the
gas chamber, head of the crematorium...

There was only one vague
function: Kapo.

The Häftling
who was wearing on the left arm a black band on which it
was written --KAPO-- in Gothic letters of immaculate
whiteness, was a chief. It was not precisely known over
whom, but it was known that he could strike, beat, kill
any Häftling who did not belong to the
inner hierarchy of the camp, Kapo could be
chief over a labor detachment, chief over a maintenance
team in the camp; he could accompany the marching columns
or to maintain order in the Appellplatz.
But apart from all these, he could strike, beat
and kill any of the Häftlings who did
not hold any function.

Kapos were
recruited from among sadists, from among the unscrupulous
ones, who forgot they belonged to the human species, from
among those who, faced with the alternative die or kill,
preferred to kill. In order to prove their servility and
to maintain their position as chiefs, they tried to
surpass the SS-men in ferocity.

The Kapos kit,
beat, killed out of sadism or envy, out of the desire to
assert themselves as chiefs or out fear of losing their
function, out of hate of man or out of the mere pleasure
to trample underfoot and torment the fellow
men.

I have seen at
Birkenau-Auschwitz, Kaufering No. 4,
Kaufering No. 9 and Landsberg,
Kaposof all nationalities, from all social
strata and the abyss of human degradation made me feel
much more pain than their blows.

At Mauthausen, the
camp which my father was killed, the first Kapowas the detainee enrolled at number 31: August
Adam.

Vicenzo and Luigi Pappalettera
wrote in their book The Brutes Have the
Floor that, every time a new transport of
detainees arrived at Mauthausen, Kapo
August Adam picked out the professors, lawyers,
priests and magistrates and cynically asked them: "Are
you a lawyer? A professor? Good! Do you see this green
triangle? This means I am a killer. I have five
convictions on my record: one for manslaughter and four
for robbery. Well, here I am in command. The world has
turned upside down, did you get that? Do you need a
Dolmetscher, an interpreter? Here it is!"
And he was pointing to his bat, after which he striked.
When he was satisfied, he formed a
Scheisskompanie with those selected and
sent them to clean the latrines.

In each concentration camp there
was a handful of Häftlings who wore a
black arm band on which it was written in Gothic letters
of immaculate white: KAPO. They were those
who, entering the gates of the camp, forgot that they
were human beings and wanted to survive abusing the
fellow men, torturing then... killing them...

Kein
Platz

At Birkenau-Auschwitz es
war kein Platz, there was no place for the dead;
that is why the dead was burnt in the crematoria. Nor was
there place for the living, and that is why almost 80 per
cent of the new-comers were led from the platform
straight into the gas chambers.

There was no place to put the
things brought along from home; they were taken and sent
to the Reich. There was no place to keep
your memories.

Then I turned my soul into a
grave and I buried there everything I had lost. But not
the memories, as there had been place for all my
dead.

I am alone. In my soul there is
kein Platz mehr, no place any more, there
is no place for anyone and for anything.

Not even for myself.

.

Kinder
(1)

First I heard my father groaning
when hit from behind the moment we went through the gates
of camp E at Birkenau, then I
felt its burn on my own back, and only afterwards I was
told that its name wasPeitsche, riding
whip.

First I saw my brother and my
friends trampled underfoot, then I was knockted down
myself by just one blow, and afterwards I knew what
Blockälteste, barrack chief, meant and
what rights he had over us.

First I looked for days and
nights on end at the gloomy building in front of us,
whose chimney was ceaselessly throwing violet-black
wreaths into the air and later I was told that he who
entered that building would only come out under the form
of smoke and ashes, and I learned its name:
Krematorium, crematorium.

First I began to hear, besides
they common shouting, crying and cursing, some distinct
hand-rending howling, of uncommon intensity, then I was
told that it was the female detainees that were howling,
after having been made sterilizing injection, they were
being taken their oversee out, or the male detainees who
were being irradiated in order to be emasculated, or the
pairs of twins brutally forced to have sexual
intercourse, and only afterwards I learned that those
were Experimente an lebendige Menschen,
experiments on living people.

All the words and phrases of
this camp dictionary first hurt me, drained my soul, and
only afterwards I learned them. Even now, after many,
many years, when I hear the word Peitsche,
I do not instantly see a rubber I hear my Father
groan and feel a horrible burning sensation all over my
body. Even now, after many, many years, when I utter the
wordBlockälteste,I first see
my brother tossing about in the dust kicked by heavy
boots, then I feel the kicks of the same boots on my own
stomach, and only later the barrack chiefs of
Birkenau, Landsberg, Kaufering and all the
other camps I knew pass in front of my eyes. At the sound
of the word KrematoriumI first feel the
small of burnt flesh in my nostrils, the smarting of the
dark violet smoke circles in my eyes, and only after
wards I do see that gloomy building. If I utter the word
Experimente the heart-rending howling of
the Häftlings used as guinea pigs
immediately break into my ears. But not ever later the
image of a fully equipped laboratory doesn't come to my
because I keep hearing those howling.

Yes, to me all the words and
phrases of this cam dictionary seemed from the very
beginning, as they do now, after so many years, painfully
real. One word alone out of those I learned then,
there was abstract, as it meant something one
could neither see, nor hear. The word
Kinder, children.

Then, and
there, Kinder was an abstract noun as there
were no children in the camps at Birkenau.
Then I arrived at Birkenau in 1944 all
children under 14 were being taken from the death
platform, located at some tens of metros from camps
A, B, C, D, E. F..., straight into the gas
chambers. Not a single child, under that age, had been
allowed to live. We uttered the word
Kinder, but there were no children there,
children who could laugh or cry, children who lived.
Neither in camp A, nor in camp
B, nor in camp C..., nor in
any other camp at Birkenau.

The last time I saw children
there was on June 9, 1944, before I left
the death platform and I entered camp E. I
saw them in the endless column dragging along towards the
gas chambers. Nursed by their mothers or sleeping in
their arms, crying for thirst or because their toys had
been lost in that terrible throng, a skiing their mothers
why they had tears in their eyes or whispering prayers,
the Kinder, the children, were making for
death.

I followed them with my eyes
until the image grew dim. First I lost sight of little
brother Valentin, who walked towards the crematorium, one
hand holding the slate close to his chest, while the
other holding mother's skirt... Then I could not see my
twin brother and sister, Cornel and Cornelia, any more...
After another ten minutes the figures of all children
grew dim, melted in that endless column of mothers, old
and sick people, whose head had penetrated inside the
crematorium.

Hundreds of thousands of
children had get down from the vans on the death platform
at Birkenau. Within less than one hour
after their arrival, they were all, without exception, in
the endless column dragging along towards the gas
chambers. And so, although at Birkenau we
kept uttering the word Kinder, children,
there were no children there, children who could laugh or
cry, children who lived. Neither in camp A,
nor in champ B, nor in camp
C..., nor in any other amputee
Birkenau.

There were no children because
the Kinder, the children, are in the future
of a people, and in the Nazi outlook the Jewish people
had to be denied a future. Reichführer
SS Heinrich Himmler had clearly and outright
stated it in front or the Gauleiters on
October 6, 1943: "I do not think it would be wise to
exterminate Jewish adults, men and women..., and let
their children live, tot ache revenge on our children and
grand-children. We must exterminate Jewish children, too,
and have this people removed from the face of the
earth."

"This action is now under
way."

Indeed, in the autumn of 1943
that action was under way. In the summer of 1944 when I
arrived at Birkenau, the action had been
almost completed. The only Kinder at
Birkenau, Jewish children under 14, were in
that endless column witch, shouting and imploring, crying
and cursing, was dragging along, from the death platform
towards the crematorium day and night.

.

Kinder
(2)

Starting 1944, at
Birkenau the word Kinder,
children, fell into disuse, as it had no meaning
any more. The survivors had been exterminated. The
newcomers aged under 14 were being taken straight into
the gas chambers. The deportees temporarily permitted to
live because all Häftlings.

The butchers of the Nazi camps
made no distinction between a 15 years old child, an
adult or an abed person. All Häftlings
were equal. The cement sacks the same weight whether thy
were thrown on the back or a child or on that adult. The
blocks were as big and had to be carried on the same
winding road, from dawn till evening, irrespective or the
age of the detainees in the Kommando. All
Häftlings &emdash; children and adult
a like &emdash; were beaten with the same riding whips or
with braided wire ropes of a similar thickness. Hunger,
thirst, cold and diseases were exhausting the
Häftlings bodies irrespective of their
age. The SS would kick with their boots,
hit with the riding whip or the rifle butt any
Häftling with the same cruelty. The
age of the Häftling was of no interest
to them, as it was of no interest to the
Kapo. Nor did the wolf dogs make any
distinction when they savagely tore off the flesh of the
Häftlings.

All Nazi camps followed the same
iron law: he Häftlings, whiter
children or adults, were Todeskandidaten,
candidates for death. No one among them was
supposed to leave the camp alive, no matter his or her
age upon internment.

However, although all
Häftlings wore the same torn striped
clothes, although they looked all older and had haggard
faces, although they did the same exhausting work and had
gone through the same tortures, there were differences
between children and adults.

The Kinder, the
children, would find it harder to endure when applied 25,
50 or 75 blows. Blood would gush from their wounds
quicker and their shouts were piercing. When mass
executions by shooting in the backhand were ordered,
there were times when, to spare the bullets, some child
would be thrown alive in the flames of the
Schleiterhaufen, of the pyre. When
exterminated in the gas chambers, the
Häftlings did not die all at the same
time; as the air was being poisoned from the bottom
upwards, the first to get asphyxiated were always the
Kinder, the children, who each time formed
the basis of that hallucinating pyramid of corpses clung
to each other. While tossing about in death convulsions,
the adults, who were tales and stronger, would
involuntary try to climb up the pyramid in search of a
breath of good air, without realizing that they were
trampling corpses of children under their
feat.

.

Konzentrationslager
(1)

During the dark years of fascism
there were many words that made millions of people in
Germany and in the occupied countries tremble with fear
when hearing them. A terrible fright gripped their souls
when they heard somebody uttering Gestapo
or SS.The word
Konzentrationslager, concentration camp,
generated a paralyzing, animal dread. Anyone who entered
the gates of such a camp was a future
corpse...

The SS men
caressing their own child -- den
Konzentrationslager, concentration camp -- called
it K.Z. Katet.

The first
Konzentrationslager, the first
Katet was established within 60 days after
Hitler's coming to power, on the 45th day of
his chancellor ship. On March 21, 1933, the daily
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
published a communiqué signed by Heinrich Himmler:
"On Wednesday, March 22, the first concentration camp,
accommodating 5.000 people will be inaugurated in the
neighborhood of Dachau..." The same years,
K.Z. Sachsenhausen was also established. By
the end of the year 27.000 detainees were in
concentration camps.

After 11 years, in the summer of
1944, when the entire Germany was crisscrossed by the
barbed-wire of the Katets, the number of
detainees had increased to several million.

Possessed by a mania for
hierarchy and classification, the SS-men
divided even the concentration camp into three
categories. The camps in the first category were for the
"less dangerous" detainees, those in the second category
-- for people having a bad dossier (having, however, a
chance to rehabilitate themselves); the living and
working conditions there were much harsher. The camps in
the third category were for those whose "return was
undesirable" and consequently they were, in fact, exactly
what they were called Knochenmühlen,
bone-grinders.

Subsequently, the differences
disappeared and all KZ became corps
factories.

The SS men's mania
for hierarchy and classification was also evident during
the first years in connection with the internments in the
concentration camps.

The first category to fill the
KZs were the political prisoners
-- communists, social-democrats, all those
considered or suspected of being hostile to the Nazi
regime, all the antifascists. Later an, an important part
of the political prisoners was represented by those
deported -- on the basis of the Nacht und
Nebel decree, night and darkness -- accused or
suspected of being enemies of the
Reich.

The next category was that of
the criminals. They were divided into two
sub-groups: a) those who had been in jail for their
crimes. Nevertheless, they had been again arrested as
unreliable persons and interned in concentration camps;
b) those who, while serving sentences of 5, 10, 20 years
or even life sentences were taken out of jail and sent to
KZs. The most merciless
Blockälteste barracks' chiefs and
Kapo were recruited from among
them.

Close to the criminals
was the so-called asocial. The
Gestapopeople, according to their
will and fancy, placed in this category anyone whom they
so wanted. That is why alongside genuine tramps, beggars,
poachers, thieves, gamblers and prostitutes, alongside
racketeers and pickpockets or swindlers, alongside
notorious drunkards, pimps and profiteers, people who
were denounced or suspected of treating badly their Nazi
servant, or of not being politely enough with the Nazi
leader of the block of flats or the street, or because
their chief at the place of work, nursing some grudge,
denounced them that "they evade work" found themselves
sent to the camp.

The most numerous category,
several millions in all, consisted of those interned on
grounds of race: the Jews and the gypsies.
Defining this category was the least headache for the
Gestapo. Especially when it came to the
Jews. He who was a Jew was well known and the Jews had to
be arrested without any distinction -- all of them, to
the last, no matter where they were.

Falling into separate categories
were: the race profanes, Jews or non-Jews,
who had infringed on the Nürnberg purity laws, the
Bibelfroschers (the Bible contenders), the
homosexuals, the emigrants who had fled
Germany to escape Nazism and were caught in the occupied
countries, the foreigners, the war
prisoners, etc.

It is difficult, almost
impossible, to enumerate all the categories as there
always were decrees, circulars, orders establishing new
categories. On July 25, 1944, in the district of Radom
(Poland) for instance, an order was issued which
stipulated: "the Reichsführer SS
ordered that in all cases of outrages or attempts on
German lives not only the criminals caught in the
very act shall be shout but, besides them, all their male
relatives shall be executed, while their female
relatives, the girls above 16 years of age included shall
be interned in a concentration camp". The entire
range of pretexts that served for establishing new
categories of detainees in the KZs could
not be reconstituted yet.

Thus, the world of the
concentration camps was extremely variegated:
revolutionary militants and common criminals, workers and
world-renowned scientist, celebrated artists and state
dignitaries, tramps as well as high prelates, magistrates
and generals.

In the beginning, the detainees
had a differentiated treatment, in accordance with the
category in which they belonged. But very soon that was
forgotten. All became Häftlings. All
became live corpses.

In the attempt -- unfortunately,
often successful -- to mislead public opinion,
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler stated
in official speeches: "First of all, rest assured that no
one is interned in camps without reason: those who are in
the camps belong in the scum, they are criminals,
abnormal being. There is no more striking proof of the
reality of the laws of heredity and race than a
concentration camps. We find their hydrocephalic people,
as well as people who squint, misshapen individuals,
half-Jews, a considerable number of people who are
inferior in point of race."

In order to lend credibility to
this lie, special arrangements were made in some camps
before allowing the visit of the Red Cross commissions or
of special envoys of various governments allied to
Hitler. Edouard Calic, deported to Oranienburg, witnessed
a number of such visits by "dignitaries of the
Axis."

On the arrival of the guests,
the commander gave orders that a sample set of the
"pensioners" be assembled at the camp's entrance,
consisting of persons worthy of a circus: dwarfs, giants,
mentally defective people and specimens belonging in all
categories of detainees, each one distinguished by the
different color of the "triangle". Then, in our presence,
the Nazi chiefs began their peroration before the
visitors:

"Behold, Sirs, these creatures;
this range of colors shows you that here is concentrated
a series of beings, dangerous not only to the
Reich, but to the entire world. I ask you,
what use are these communists, these alarming stateless
people, these Jews, these bandits, these homosexuals,
these idiots?"

Set like wolfhounds by the very
head of the SS, Reichsfährer Heinrich
Himmler, the SS-men showed diabolic zeal in
making each camp function as a death factory.

Over 100,000 SS
men enrolled in the famous Totenkopf1regiments, supervised for years the watch towers
of the thousands of KZs and guarded their
barbed-wires, cordoned off the detainees detachments
taken out for slave labor, always kept, day and night, a
hand on the sub-machine gun ready to shoot, and in the
other hand a horsewhip ready to strike; they had only one
mission, governed by a simple aim; none of the millions
of Häftlings who entered the gates of
a Konzentrationslager, a concentration
camp, should get out but durch den Kamin,
trough the chimney.

1Skull.

.

Konzentrationslager
(2)

The KZs had
multiple meanings, countless facets.

The main and most general
significance was death. Their most
significant facet was that of death
factories. Passing through the gates of any
KZ meant stepping into the arms of death.
Millions of innocent people, especially Jews, went from
the platform directly to the gas chamber. Even if one was
not immediately exterminated, having entered a
KZ one was in the realm of death. One was,
as a great writer wrote -- on the basic of his own
experience -- on another planet. There, the conditions of
life and work were most unusual, unearthly. That is why
one who has never been a Häftling
cannot perceive in his human mind the inhumanity of a
Konzentrationslager, of a Nazi
concentration camp.

A lot has been said and written
about beatings and tortures, about the criminal
promiscuity and the lack of the most elementary
conditions of sanitation, about the extreme physical
misery caused by chronicle hunger, thirst, could, lack of
sleep. About the exhausting, overtiring work. About the
abuse and humiliation of the detainees, the trading of
any shred of dignity. But all the suffering of various
degrees of intensity are common to all the camps and
prisons of totalitarian, dictatorial regimes. In the
KZ each human suffering was exacerbated
beyond any imaginable limit. The Häftling
was not beaten only when he was punished with
25... 50 or 75 blows, he was beaten permanently: in the
morning by Blockälteste, the barracks
chief, in order to jump out quicker from the bunk, to
hurry up dressing, to come out on the double for the
Appell; then Lagerälteste
(the Häftlings -- who was
chief of the camp) and his aides beat him ruthlessly to
enter in the front and keep the alignment.

On the way to the work place one
was beaten either with the horsewhip and the rifle butt
by the SS-men or with the cudgel by the
Kapo. Work and beating went hand in hand,
were like twin sisters. A "self-respecting"
Kapo could not pass by without imparting
stimulating blows and if in answer one had no strength to
intensify the rhythm one was lost: beaten until one fell
down, then trumped under feet until blood gushed out; it
was with great difficulty that one could rise to resume
working in order to survive another day. The tortures
were not connected -- as in the usual prison -- only to
the interrogation at the political section
Gestapo of the camp, but to the whims,
often to the mere desire for diversion of a group of
bored SS-men, or to the caprices of a
Kapo. The permanent hunger, the animal
hunger lasting for months and years in the
KZs cannot be described; for the survivors
themselves it is a mystery how they could endure
it.

But the essential difference
between a KZand any other place of torture
known in history on our planet consists in the lack of
any rights for the Häftling, in his
being disregarded as a human being. The
Häftling was not even recognized the
elementary right to live. Consequently, one had neither
who to complain to, nor the right to complain to anyone
that one had no food, that one was unjustly beaten, that
at the "roll call", "at the place of work" or " last
evening in the barracks" one's father, brother or one's
best friend was killed by a blow on the temple, his over
the head with an iron bar, trampled under feet or pushed
into a swamp by an SS-man, by the
Kapo or by the Blockälteste.
Not only the SS-men, but also every
Häftling who had a place in the camp's
hierarchy had the right of life and death over the rest.
He could order anything and one had to carry the order
out without saying a word. One could be ordered: to
uproot the grass with one's teeth, to put one's head in
the tub of excrements, to whip one's own brother or
comrade, to recover one's cap witch the
SS-man had thrown beyond the established
perimeter knowing that stepping beyond the line one could
be immediately reached by a bullet, to hang oneself by
driving oneself a nail in the wall and using the noose
that was placed in one's hand.

The
Konzentrationslager, the concentration
camps also distinguished themselves by the scale of
assassinations. There were thousands of KZs
in witch killings were done. There were hundreds of
KZs in which, in each of them, hundreds of
thousands of people were assassinated. In tens of
KZs hundreds of thousands of people were
liquidated. At Treblinka 1.300.000 were
exterminated, at Auschwitz-Birkenau over
four million.

In spite of incontestable
realities, even on the eve of the total Collapse, in
April 1945, Himmler continued to lie trying to further
mislead public opinion. He played the indignant learning
how the Allies described the realities found in the
liberated KZs. In an interview with Count
Bernadotte, Himmler voiced his indignation on the ground
that "irreproachable camp became the subject of shameful
descriptions". Himmler further said that he would order
an inquiry in connection with the absolutely
ridiculous descriptions, which the Allies had
about Buchenwald and
Bergen-Belsen.

The truth is that when Brigadier
Glyn Hunhes, the deputy director of the medical services
of the British army of the Rhine, entered the camp at
Bergen-Belsen, a few hours after
Lieutenant-Colonel Taylor, what he saw with his own eyes
was unbelievable, impossible to put on paper. "No
description or photograph", he said, "could truly render
the horrors outside the barracks, while the dreadful
scenes inside them were even more terrible."

According to E. Russel's book
"The Scourge of the Swastika", heaps of
corpses were lying all over the camp, outside and inside
the barracks, the dead and the living together. By the
crematorium there were common graves that had been
covered and a trench full of corpses.

The barracks were packed with
detainees, each one more drained and more ill than other;
in some, which could accommodate a hundred persons only,
there were a thousand.

There was no sanitation and the
conditions in the barracks were revolting because the
majority of the detainees suffered from one form or
another of gastric-enteritis and were too week to go out.
In any case, the latrines in the barracks had ceased
being usable since long. In the woman's compartment there
was a deep ditch over witch a crosspiece had been place,
but there was no screen or any from of
privacy.

Those who were strong enough
could go out of the compartment; the others relieved
themselves wherever they were lying. The compartments
were full of human excrements.

In a compartment there were
8.000 male detainees and typhus was raging. In one of the
compartments for women there were 23.000 women and
countless corpses were lying about. In a barrack near
which there was a heap of corpses dead women were lying
in the corridor; in a room opening in the corridor there
were so many corpses that it was impossible to add
more.

Seventy cent of the detainees
required hospitalization and to all probability, 10.000
of them would die before they could be admitted to a
hospital.

The morning after the
inspection, Brigadier Glyn Hughes toured the camp again
together with Kramer, who led him to one of the open
graves. The commander was completely insensible and
indifferent. "I've been a doctor for thirty years", said
Brigadier Glyn Hughes, "I've seen all the horrors of the
war but nothing of all the things I've seen can be
compared to this." He also said that it seemed that
nothing had been done to preserve the life and the health
of the detainees.

Shortly after the arrival of the
British army the camp was filmed, and the film was shown
at the trial of the Belsen camp staff.
Speaking about it, Colonel T.M. Backhouse, the chief
British prosecutor at the trial, said that the film would
give an idea of the degradation human mind could come to.
One could see thousands of corpses lying everywhere and
the condition the corpses were in. One could see the
well-fed countenance of the SS-men who were
there. One could see people tying to get water from a
cistern but they would not see that the water was dirty
and that there were corpses in it. One could see the
dead, one could see the living, and one could see the
dying. But the film, said he, could not render the
terrible smell. The dirtiness and the misery of the
place. The stench that was rising to heavens.

I repeat what I have said in the
beginning: one who has never been a
Häftling cannot perceive in his human
mind the inhumanity of a
Konzentrationslager, of a concentration
camp.

.

Krematorium

The Nazi was fond of boasting at
every step with their promptitude, punctiliousness and
foresight when starting on a job. And it was in the very
activity in which they were masters -- mass assassination
-- they gave proof of a crass lack of
foresight.

They started killing without
thinking what would they do with the corpses. They
inventoried all the methods of killing and ranged them
according to the anticipated efficiency. They perfected
to detail each method, from the phenol injection made
"around" the heart or "directly" onto the heart and,
passing through the shooting through the back of the
head, to suffocation in smart vans, turned into trailers
for excursions or in huge gas chambers.

Busy with establishing and
improving the methods of killing, with the more rapid and
efficient organization of the assassinations, they purely
and simply forget that causing death had a by-product the
corpse.

Yes, they started killing
without thinking what they would do with the
corpses.

In the early part of the fascist
darkness, when in the Gestapo Bunkers and
in the concentration camps tens and hundreds killed the
detainees, the omission went almost unobserved. The
victims were incinerated or buried according to the
"traditional methods". When assassinations acquired
proportions and, in a single camp or in a single forest,
the number of those killed in one action amount to
thousands or even tens of thousands, it became clear that
the "traditional methods" of burial were no longer
satisfactory. Therefore, it was restored to huge common
graves, in fact one kilometer-long ditches, several
meters in depth, in which tens of thousands of corpses
were thrown; slake lime was thrown over them, and they
were covered with a thick layer of earth.

At the beginning of its
existence, the huge concentration camp at
Auschwitz was no exception. According to
the confession of former commander, Rudolf Höss,
"The corpses were to be placed in long and deep trenches,
in the nearly gazing ground. We did not think of
cremation at that time".

The inadmissible lack of
foresight was clearly obvious when the number of those
killed in a single camp rose to hundreds of thousands and
had to go up to millions. The organizers of the
assassinations and especially the hierarchical heads of
the concentration camps &emdash; from commanders to the
Reichsführere SS Himmler &emdash;
started growing impatient. For the millions of corpses
trenches, hundreds of kilometers long, would have been
needed. And, even the smallest ones, dug and filled with
corpses along the forests and plains in the territories
occupied in the East, started posing problems. The stench
of the decomposing corpses exhaled through the earth
layer, causing agitation among the population of the
respective regions. In places, the earth had been dug by
animals or washed by the waters and the corpses were
uncovered, posing the danger of a great
epidemic.

The question of preserving the
secret was becoming more and more acute, too. The huge
common graves, the innumerable trenches filled with
corpses were serious proofs of the crimes. Consequently,
it was ordered that they were removed in the shortest
time. There was only one solution: the exhumation and the
cremation of the corpses. Blombel, entrusted this task by
Himmler himself, tried at Kulmhof to dispose of the
corpses, even by blowing them up, but the method did not
yield the desired results. Thus, cremation
became general.

At the trial, Rudolf Höss
would recall: "In the summer of 1942, we were still
burying corpses in common graves. It was only late that
summer that we started cremating them, at first by
placing some 2.000 corpses on a stack of wood, then in
trenches, in the case of the exhumed corpses. The corpses
were at first splashed with remounts of oil, and
subsequently with the trenches. By the end of November
1942, the trenches were completely empty".

In spite of the efficiency
ensured, the method was not approved. The cremation had
to be improved.

"From the first open air
cremation it was clear that this method could not be of
long duration. In bad weather, the smell of burnt meat
spread over many square kilometers and made the
population living in that zone talk about the burning of
the Jews., in spite of the propaganda, promoted by the
party and the administrative bodies, which asserted the
opposite" (Rudolf Höss).

The professionals of crime were
altered. For the first time, those who had as their basic
profession death were gathered together for
an exchange of experience. All camp commanders were
summoned at Sachsenhausen with the purpose
of standardizing and improving the shooting in the
back of the head. Those who lacked practice were
sent to Treblinka to study gassing.
However, the main question was not how to produce
corpses, but what to do with them.

Rudolf Höss, the commander
of the Birkenau-Auschwitz camp, was not
satisfied with what he saw in the others camps. Others
were dealing with thousands and tens of thousands of
corpses. His camp had to be prepared to solve the problem
of millions of corpses. And he found the solution:
burning them in crematoria. The idea was not new. As
early as July 14, 1941, the Erfurt firm "J.A. Topf and
Sons", answering a letter from the SS
command of the Mauthausen camp, underling
in black and white: "In the Topf double coupling
crematoria ovens, using coke, 30-35 corpses can be
cremated daily, without overburdening the oven. In case
the conditions so require, nothing happens even if the
cremations go on uninterruptedly day and
night".

However, Rudolf Höss needed
crematoria in which not tens but
thousands, many thousands of corpses could
be cremated daily. And he applied himself to the task
with the help of the specialists: engineers, technicians,
and physicians. All was belonging to the
SS. All desirous to kill as much as
possible. They brought together, within the same
building, the ovens and huge gas chambers.

Every crematorium was built with
the Häftlings labor and blood, of
course. Tens and tens of thousands of detainees worked
day and night whipped by the Kapos,
maltreated by the SS-men, to erect the
stone and brick walls. According to Nyiszli
Miklós' reconstitution, each stone in those walls
was splatters with the blood of tens of thousands of
hapless detainees who, starved, perched with thirst,
scantly dressed, fed with food not fit for pigs even,
labored day and night at those terrible death factories,
so that their own bodies are consumed by flames, in the
ovens built by their own hands. The crematoria were
fitted with the most modern installations. The same
Nyiszli described them as follows: "The roaring of huge
fans, run by electrical engines, is heard; they kindle
the fire to heat the ovens at the required temperature.
Fifteen such fans are operating simultaneously: one for
each oven. The cremation hall is a bright room, some one
hundred and fifty meters long, white washed, whit
concrete floor and has enormous windows fitted with iron
lattice. The fifteen boilers are each separately built
into huge red brick constructions. Their massive iron
doors, black and shining, range in line along the
room.

The first new conception
Krematorium, of industrial dimensions, as
well as the first modern gas chamber was ready to be
inaugurated by the end of February 1943. In one of the
minutes of the Nürnberg International Military
Tribunal it was recorded: "Important guests from Berlin
attended the inauguration of the first crematorium in
March 1943. The program provided for the gassing and
cremation of 8.000 Jews from Cracow. The guests, among
whom there were officers and civilians, were quite
satisfied and jostled each other at the peep hole made in
the gas chamber door. They vied each other in praising
this newly built installation".

But neither the capacity of this
crematorium could cope with the rhythm of killing at
Birkenau-Auschwitz. Three more such
crematoria were quckly built. And thus, in Birkenau, from
the spring of 1943 until almost to the end of 1944,
crematoria number 1, number 2, number 3 and number 4
functioned day and night (except when under
repair).

Speaking about the capacity of
the crematoria, Rudolf Höss stated: "The highest
figure, in the summer of 1944, during the action in
Hungary, amounted, in 24 hours, to something more than
9.000 through gassing and cremation in all the
installations we had at our disposal "

On the day when I arrived with
my parents and brothers at Birkenau -- June
9, 1944 -- all four crematoria were functioning. That's
why I could not learn, I will never learn, in which of
them, whether number 1 2 3 or number 4
were my mother Iolanda, my twin brother -- Cornel and
Cornelia -- and the youngest of the family -- Valnetin --
cremated.

.

Kristallnacht

The elimination of the Jews from
the life of Nazi Germany began immediately after Hitler's
coming to power and it was done in an organized way, with
faultless consistency, with a typically Nazi
meticulosity. The persecution of the Jews had become the
official state policy. Gradually but perseveringly, the
Jews were forbidden all professions, excluded from all
activities, removed from all offices. Each blow,
interdiction, exclusion was preceded by a certain
psychological preparation, which was followed by a
decree, by the promulgation of a law or the announcement
of an order.

Hover, all this required time,
and the Nazi chiefs considered that die
Judenverfolgung, the persecution of Jews, was
carried on too slowly, and that it was insufficiently
harsh and spectacular. They were looking for an
opportunity that "would justify" before the international
public opinion the passing to a general
attack.

And the opportunity came up. On
November 7, 1938, a young German-Polish Jew, Herschel
Grunspan, entered the Hitlerism embassy in Paris and
mortally shot Ernst Von Rath, councilor of the
embassy.1

Two days were sufficient for the
Gestapo to organize and unleash, all over
Germany, einen Judenpogrom,a pogrom
against the Jews, that would appear as "eine
spontane Volksemporung", "spontaneous public
indignation".

The order for the organization,
on November 9, 1938, of the "spontaneous indignation" of
the people, signed on behalf of the Gestapo
by Müller, was sent to all inspectorates and posts
of the state police and devastated, but also how many
should be arrested: "etwa 20-30.000 Juden",
about 20-30.000 Jews. In order that the action would be
carried out in the envisaged dimensions, the order
stipulated that police appeal to the SS
troops.

On the night of 9 to 10
November, the Nazi gangs savagely pounced, as if at a
signal, in all the towns of the Reich at
the same time, upon the Jewish synagogues and stores,
plundering and setting them on fire; they entered the
houses killing and robbing; the Jews caught in the
streets were abused, maltreated, killed.

The streets were literally
covered with the crystal fragments from windows of the
broken Jewish stores and the demolished synagogues. Hence
the name die Kristallnacht, the night of
the crystals, attributed to that night of hatred, madness
and crime.

The resulted of the
Kristallnaght, the night of the crystals,
was somber: 267 synagogues and prayer houses set on fire;
over seven thousand Jewish stores completely demolished,
others burnt to the ground, tens of thousands of shop
windows broken, thousands of enterprises and houses
devastated; almost one hundred dead, thousands of
wounded; over 26.000 Jews were taken from their beds,
arrested and sent to concentration camp. To
Buchenwald, to Dachau, to
Sachsenhausen.

The consequences of the
Kristallnacht, of the crystal night, were
even more somber. Only three days later, on November 12,
in a meeting presided over by Göring -- attended by
Gürtner, the minister of justice, Dr. Frick, the
home minister, Heydrich, the chief of the Berlin
Gestapo, Funk, the minister of economy,
other ministers, including Göbbels, who had stated
that the legal way in which the Jewish question was
settled in the Reich was the most loyal and
human possible -- "it was decided that all the damages
produced to the Jewish shops, enterprises and houses on
8/9 and 10/11 November, 1938 should be repaired by the
Jewish owners at their own cost". Concomitantly, in
consequence to Kristallnacht, the crystal
night, in the same meeting, the Jews were assigned, as an
atonement, to pay a collective tribute to the
Reich amounting to a thousand million
marks. "This will subdue [the Jews -- O.L.]" --
Göring observed. "The swains would not commit very
soon another assassination".

At the same time, measures that
would humiliate "even more" the Jews were discussed. We
quote from the minutes of that meeting:

Göring: " I insist
that the concerned authorities should take one after
another, the necessary measures for Aryanizing the
economy. The basic idea is the following: the Jew is
eliminated from the economy and surrenders to the state
his economic wealth "

Göbbels: " I consider
necessary that an order be issued now, whereby the Jews
are forbidden to go to German theatres, cinematography
and circuses it is also necessary that the Jews
withdraw everywhere from public life the Jews
should be prohibited to go to German spas and holiday
resorts I deem necessary that the Jews be
altogether banished from the German
schools "

Heydrich: " I must take
steps in Germany, which would isolate Jews. For
isolation, I would make, in brief, suggestion of a police
nature, for instance the personal marking of the Jews, by
decreeing: Each Jew must wear a certain
sign "

Funk: "The Jew must be squeezed
hard".

What following after
Kristallnacht, after the crystal night, was
best described by Göring himself, who felt the need
to exclaim at the end of the meeting to which we
referred: "I would not want to be a Jew in
Germany".

1The
point is that, on October 28, 1938, Heydrich's policemen
knock at the doors of 17.000 Jews who were Polish
citizens and who lived in Germany. Hitler, taking
advantage of the fact that the Polish government had
cancelled their passports, organized the first great Jew
deportation in modern history. Put on board trains and
trucks &endash; allowing them to take along, from all
their belongings, only as much as they could carry
&endash; the thousands of arrested Jews were taken
towards the Polish border. In the vicinity of Benshen
station, the Jews were disembarked and chased like cattle
over the fields toward the east. Heydrich's policemen
ruthlessly wielded the horsewhips, cudgels, rifle butts.
Old people and women with babies in their arms, the sick
collapse exhausted. They are trodden upon. Many could not
rise. They remain their forever. Among those hunted down
was Sendel Grynszpan with his wife and children. Having
reached empty handed in Poland he described what happened
in a letter sent to his son Herszel Grynszpan. Determined
to take revenge by himself and, at the same time, to draw
the attention of the public opinion to the persecution
unleashed in Germany against the Jews, Herschel Grunspan
(under this name he would become know all over the world,
decided to carry out that daring act).

.

Kugel-Erlass

Those who entered the gates of a
concentration camp had their fate sealed. The hope to
survive was all practical purposes inexistent. For some,
it was excluded ab ovo. Among those ranked
all those sent to the camp under
Kugel-Erlass, the bullet order.

In fact, Aktion-Kugel,
action-bullet, referring, first of all, to the
extermination of the Soviet prisoners was settled a few
days before the unleashing of the aggression against the
USSR through the instructions given to the
Einsatzgrupen, the operative group, in fact
death group, who accompanied the invading arming groups.
"There is no reason to have soft feelings for the Russian
wae prisoners. Therefore, all Soviet prisoners identified
by the Einsatzgrupen, as suspect will be
shot without delay.

"After the confirmation of the
execution order, it will immediately be carried out. It
is not allowed that the Soviet prisoners to whom the
measure referred renaming in the respective camps. The
executions will not be carried out in the camp or in
their vicinity, because they must not be made public. In
principle, there should not be witnesses. According to
the order of the competent inspectorate in Dresden, the
Soviet prisoners identified as suspect will be urgently
transported to a concentration camp where the execution
will take place "

Then, on March, 1944, the head
of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, gave
a special order that all military escaped from caps be
sent to concentration camp and killed, after their
arrival there, with a shot in the back of the head. The
orders of the Gestapo were reinforced and
enlarged by the Kugel-Erlass, the
bullet-order, signed by Marshal Keitel, the supreme
commander of the Wehrmacht. It had the following
contents:

"To be sent in secret. Secret
government business."

"Subject: steps to be taken
against the war prisoners who have escaped and are
caught, officers and NCO-s who do not work, except the
British and American war prisoners. The supreme commander
has ordered the following:

Any war prisoner who has
escaped and is caught, officer or NCO who does not
work, except the British and American war
prisoners, must be handed over to the chief of
police and security service with mention
´Measure IIIª, no matter if the escape
took place during a transport, or if it was a group
or individual one.

As the handing over of
the war prisoners to the secret police and the
security service is absolutely secret, the other
war prisoners must not know that the respective
prisoners have been caught. The army intelligence
will be informed of their escape, but not of the
fact that they were caught. Consequent measure will
be taken with regard to their correspondence. The
same answers will be given to the investigators and
to the representatives of the protecting powers, to
the International Red Cross and to other assistance
bodies."

Through subsequent orders, known
as the second Kugel-Erlass, the second
bullet-order, the above provisions were extended to the
civilian workers who ran away, as well as to the enemy
soldiers taken prisoners during sabotage actions, the
British and American ones included.

In order to give an outline of
what the implementation of Kugel-Erlass,
the bullet-order meant, we shall quote from the statement
made at Nürnberg by Lieutenant-Colonel Guivante de
Saint-Gast and Lieutenant Jean Veith of the French army.
"At Mauthausen the prisoners in the
Kugel decree. When the transports arrived,
the prisoners belonging to the "K" category
were not registered, did not receive a number and their
names were known only to the officials in the
Politische Abteilung1. The
"K" prisoners were immediately lead to the jail.
They were undressed and taken to the ´shower
roomª. The shower room, situated in the basement of
the jail, near the crematorium, was specially designed
for the execution of the prisoners, either by bullets, or
by gassing. An altogether special measuring apparatus was
used for this purpose. The prisoner was placed under the
apparatus which, automatically, shot a bullet in the back
of head the moment the apparatus touched the top of the
head. When a transport of "K" prisoners was
too large, they did not lose time to measure them; they
were exterminated by gassing "

When he had to account for his
deeds, Unterscharführer SS Josef
Niedermayer, the head of barrack 20 at
Mauthausen, said: "The so-called
bullet-order, which I read with my own eyes and which was
signed by commander Kaltenbrunner, stipulated that the
war prisoners who escaped and were caught, except the
British and the American ones, be sent to
Mauthausen to be liquidated. Which regard
to barrack 20, I received orders from commander Ziereis,
from Bachmayer, from Zutter and from Dr.
Walter.

I repeat that carried out the
executions on receiving orders; had not carried out the
orders, I Would have been Killed myself. I took part in
about 400 executions in the cells of Captains Bachmayer,
Zoller or Lieutenant Altfuldisch.

I had to prepare those selected
for execution. I took them to the undressing room, which
was the anteroom to the place where the executions were
carried out. The executions were directed by commander
Ziereis and by Bachmayer or Zoller, by Schults or
Altfuldisch or Zutter."

.

Künstler

Our barrack is dug into the
earth as, in fact, all the barracks of KZ
Landsberg. Seen from outside, it looks like a
tomb due to its triangular roof. Inside, it resembles a
coffin. Yet it is much bigger: it has room for 50 people.
There is no furniture. The only item it contains is the
iron store placed in the middle of the
barrack.

There are not beds. On the right
hand, a strip of earth, one and a half meter in width,
the length of the barrack, covered by boards: it is the
"bed" for twenty five Häftlings. One
meter per man. On the left side a similar "bed" for the
other twenty-five. Between the two strips a ditch, one
meter deep, gives access to the "beds".

However, we feel relieved wen we
enter the barrack! It means the end of a tormenting day.
That for six hours we shall see no SS-man,
the horsewhips will be still, the beatings will cease and
the wind won't torment us.

For the moment the iron store
gives more smoke than heat. The fir branches brought from
the forest are wet and hardly catch fire. But we do not
lose courage. Every evening is like this. We have become
accustoming to smoke. Lice give us more trouble. They
swarm on us in thousands. We shake out the lice from our
clothes like dust. Some take off their shirts and place
them on the hat iron store. They say that lice's burn
quickly. They singe their shirts, but they do not get rid
of the lice.

Now we have a quiet
moment in the barrack. Nobody moves. The clothes shaking
is over, the talking, as well as the sighing has
ceased Der Künstler, the artist
stands up. He will start his program.

Yes, twice a week, and
sometimes-even more often, we have a show in our barrack.
The team consists of a single
Künstler, artist: Häftling
S.

"Mr. Artist", as most people
call him, is a newcomer in our barrack. From the first
day he told us his whole life. He enthusiastically spoke
of his successes on the stages of the theatres of
Budapest, about the life of the artists, and about his
plans. For days on end he spoke of his wife.

"Her name is Szilágyi
Szabó Eszter"; he used to tell us. "You must know
her. She is a cinema star. We got married last year. We
did not register our marriage at the mayor's office. You
know, I love her very much. She is a Christian. I am a
Jew. I would not want her come to grief on my
account."

One day, he took out a
photograph from his pocket. Look at her! You must not say
I am boasting. The photo passed from hand to hand. "How
did you save the photo?" We asked. "I have not been at
Auschwitz. The Jews of Budapest were not
deported. Yet, when the szalasysts took
over the power there started some terrible pogroms. The
Jews were taken out by tens of thousands from their
houses and under the threat of machine-guns were led away
and pushed into the Danube. I was caught by chance in the
street, like many others, and from Budapest we were taken
directly to the concentration camps".

Der Künstler,
artist S. has an extraordinary
memory. He not only knows all the roles he played, but
also full plays.

He has the talent to change his
voice, to use such varied intonations in his speech that
if one close one's eyes gets the impression that each
part is played by another artist. When it's over, there
is a storm of applause's, and his eyes sparkle with joy.
The applause's are but a down payment. The true reward
for his talent he receives next evening. When food
arrives, one of us takes a mess tin and goes with it to
all the people in the barrack. Each Häftling
gives a spoon or at least half a spoon of food
for the artist. It adds up to almost a full helping.
While everybody is clapping, the mess tin with the new
helping of food is handed over to the artist.

In the Nazi concentration camps,
each drop of is a treasure. Many a time one must witness
the sad performance of three-four
Häftlings falling upon a potato peel. The
SS-men look on with satisfaction and smile
to each other: We succeeded! We stifled their
dignity.

It's not true! It as a lie. The
SS people delude themselves! The truth is
that in a camp surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by
stupid SS-men, the
Häftlings of a barrack, sentenced to
death, give twice a week, give willingly, with all their
hearts, a spoon of food for the artist, for art, for
life!

I became friendly with the
artist. When we go to work we always go into same row.
"When I shall be again free", he used to tell me, "I
shall give a big performance in the honor of you people,
of all those who came to know each other here, in the
camp. I shall announce the performance months in advance,
through the newspapers, so that you all come. The setting
will be sober. The stage will represent the interior of a
barrack. I shall play dressed in the clothes of a
Häftling. After the performance we
shall have a banquet. I won't order food for myself. I
shall keep the present mess tin. I shall go in turn to
each of you and ask for a spoon of food. It will be an
unforgettable banquet. All the newspapers will write
about it."

Häftling
S. did not perform again in Budapest. Neither the
banquet took place. Häftling S. died,
of starvation, two days before
liberation.